Cardiac diseases are one of the leading causes of death in the western countries and due to stressful lifestyle are alarmingly increasing in Asian and South Asian counties as well. The majority of cardiac deaths are sudden, and nearly half of the cardiac deaths occur outside hospitals. Staggeringly, 63.4% of heart disease deaths that occurred fall into the category of sudden cardiac death. In addition, 46.9% of heart disease patients who died, did so before reaching the hospital, while another 16.5% were pronounced dead on arrival or died immediately upon arrival in the emergency room. In fact, cardiac disease is the leading cause of death in the developed countries as well as in most of the emerging nation. Studies indicate that approximately 70% of the people who die of cardiac diseases are not diagnosed until their death. These studies demonstrate that all patients with diagnosed cardiac disease and people with high risk of cardiac disease would benefit by being monitored for early detection of cardiac abnormalities. Interestingly, most of the cardiac abnormalities, in many cases are transient and can be avoided if detected at an early stage. (Chaikowski et al. z. telemed med. telemat.-2008.-Vol. 6, No 1.-P.25-27).
Vehical driving is affected by an increasing number and complexity of Driver Assistance Systems (DAS), resulting in a raised cognitive load of a driver. Consequently, these DASs add to the distraction from the main activity of driving (Riener et al., 2009). A number of potential solutions have been proposed so far, however, these techniques broaden the perception horizon of a driver e.g. the introduction of the sense of touch as additional information modality or the utilization of multimodal instead of unimodal interfaces. These solutions demand attention of the driver. In order to cope with the issues of workload and/or distraction, it is essential to find a non-distracting and noninvasive solution for generation of significant sensory information about the driver's awareness and health condition.
For many of the above stress monitoring systems it is also expected to confirm the identity of the driver to avoid an unauthorized access to a vehicle and thus enable decision making for alert generation. There are biometric techniques for disclosing the identity of the driver to the car. Fingerprint is one of the most popular methods. Recently it has been shown that ECG can be used as a biometric input for person identification. The work in (Irvine et al., 2009, EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Volume 2009, Article ID 243215, 13 pages) describes the results of such an experimentation of using ECG as a biometric.
Some of the inventions which deal in cardiac monitoring in vehicle are as follows:
US20070265540 discloses a heart-rhythm monitoring device for a vehicle which determines whether a driver has an arrhythmia while driving the vehicle or not.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,641 discloses an apparatus and method to monitor heartbeat pulse information for improving the awareness of vehicle drivers by prompting the vehicle driver when it is determined that the awareness of the vehicle driver is decreasing due to the driver falling asleep. However, it failed to disclose the ECG monitoring and secure biometric identification of the driver with display of ECG waveform along with heart rate.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,706,072 discloses a human condition and security controlling apparatus on road-vehicles for detecting the condition of a driver by measuring fluctuation in heart rate and taking a given security action in accordance with the detected result but it failed to disclose ECG monitoring and biometric identification of driver.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,599,243 discloses a system for advising or averting potentially dangerous driving situations based on an analysis of driver stress but it failed to disclose display of health status or ECG waveform and generation of alert with the facility of making E-call in case of emergency.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,783,997 discloses a cardiac rate measuring apparatus which measures the cardiac rate of a driver without restraining motions of the driver and U.S. Pat. No. 6,575,902 discloses a system for monitoring, recording and/or analyzing vigilance, alertness or wakefulness and/or a stressed state of an operator of equipment or machinery but both failed to disclose ECG monitoring and biometric identification of the driver with display of ECG waveform along with heart rate and also facility of making emergency call.
However, all the above mentioned inventions do not provide personalization of vehicle and identification of driver by using Electrocardiography.
In order to overcome the above mentioned drawbacks in the prior art, the present invention provides an integrated the ECG sensing device in vehicle for vehicle security, personalization and monitoring the heart status.